good for him and his art.  By being thrown so much back upon himself, he said, he had been forced to become original.  Whether it made him original or not, he never thought of changing it until his prince died, and for a time his services were not wanted at Esterhaz or Eisenstadt.  Then he came to England, and by his success here made a European reputation (for it was then as it is now—­an artist was only accepted on the musical Continent after he had been stamped with the hall-mark of unmusical England).  Finally he settled in Vienna, was for a time the teacher of Beethoven, declared his belief that the first chorus of the “Creation” came direct from heaven, and died a world-famous man.

To the nineteenth century mind it seems rather an odd life for an artist:  at least it strikes one as a life, despite Haydn’s own opinion, not particularly conducive to originality.  To use extreme language, it might almost be called a monotonous and soporific mode of existence.  Probably its chief advantage was the opportunity it afforded, or perhaps the necessity it enforced, of ceaseless industry.  Certainly that industry bore fruit in Haydn’s steady increase of inventive power as he went on composing.  But he only took the prodigious leap from the second to the first rank of composers after he had been free for a time from his long slavery, and had been in England and been aroused and stimulated by new scenes, unfamiliar modes of life, and by contact with many and widely differing types of mind.  Some of his later music makes one think that if the leap—­a leap almost unparalleled in the history of art—­had been possible twenty years sooner, Haydn might have won a place by the side of Mozart and Handel and Bach, instead of being the lowest of their great company.  On the other hand, one cannot think of the man—­lively, genial, kind-hearted, garrulous, broadly humorous, actively observant of details, careful in small money matters—­and assert with one’s hand on one’s heart that he was cast in gigantic or heroic mould.  That he had a wonderful facility in expressing himself is obvious in every bar he wrote:  but it is less obvious that he had a great deal to express.  He had deep, but not the deepest, human feeling; he could think, but not profoundly; he had a sense of beauty, delicate and acute out of all comparison with yours or mine, reader, but far less keen than Mozart’s or Bach’s.  Hence his music is rarely comparable with theirs:  his matter is less weighty, his form never quite so enchantingly lovely; and, whatever one may think of the possibilities of the man in his most inspired moments, his average output drives one to the reluctant conclusion that on the whole his life must have been favourable to him and enabled him to do the best that was in him.  Yet I hesitate as I write the words.  Remembering that he began as an untaught peasant, and until the end of his long life was a mere bandmaster with a small yearly salary, a uniform, and possibly (for I cannot